This Is Us' Milo Ventimiglia and Mandy Moore Reveal the Surprising Ways They're Not Like Their Characters

It's a pretty well-known fact that Milo Ventimiglia shares a lot of similarities with his This Is Us alter ego, Jack Pearson ("Milo is Jack, a thousand percent!" Mandy Moore told us at the show's recent Paleyfest panel. "He is our team leader, our patriarch.") Moore herself even acknowledges she's more like Rebecca than not: "She likes to take care of those around her and puts them before herself. So maybe that’s a good and bad thing that I’m trying to work on." But how are Ventimiglia and Moore not like Jack and Rebecca? Well, it turns out that season-one finale exposed some major differences.

"That fight between Jack and Rebecca was pretty electric," Moore explained. "I don’t think I get that heated! But who knows? If my buttons were pushed like hers were, and if somebody spoke to me the way that Jack speaks to her [in that scene], I might have a quick retort and get a little hot like that.”

And because Ventimiglia considers Moore to be "the nicest person on the planet," it wasn't easy for him to lash out at his TV wife in that dramatic moment. "I know everyone says I'm most like Jack, but I don't think I'd be as upset with Rebecca going on tour as Jack was," Ventimiglia said. "It was a difficult thing for me to even get behind that. Of course, it plays into the drama and this is who that man is, but for me, I’m looking at Jack like, ‘It’s fine! Let her go perform! That’s what she wants to do. You’re going to be fine. The family structure is there. Yeah, you may not like who she’s performing with, and you were right [about Ben],' but, at the same time, it’s like, that was one thing I disagreed with Jack on just as a man."

Ventimiglia had previously admitted that he had to side with Jack in order to make the scene effective as an actor ("I know in the moment, I had to back up Jack. I have to," Ventimiglia told Entertainment Weekly). Still, "I have a lot of confidence, and if who I was with—if my wife—wanted to go follow that path and sing, then great," he told us. "Yes! I’ll be in the front row every time.”

But if you thought the fight scene was brutal to watch, there was actually a much nastier one viewers didn't see. "There were a couple of expletives that didn’t make it into the scene," Moore revealed. "It was painful. It was intense."

So what's next when the series comes back, presumably in the fall? Though no one is really talking, director and co–executive producer Glenn Ficarra will say that "there have been advanced talks…but [the writers] have to reconvene in June, actually, to really get it going. The great thing about the show is it’s like this spiderweb, and we’re able to go off in all directions and delve deep into people."